This is for those of you that think that Israel has a choice.

…Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud wrote for Egypt’s leading newspaper. His subject: the Jews.

They are accursed in heaven and on earth. They are accursed from the day the human race was created and from the day their mothers bore them. . . These accursed ones are a catastrophe for the human race. They are the virus of the generation, doomed to a life of humiliation and wretchedness. And so on through many paragraphs, climaxing with a lament to Adolf Hitler: If only you had done it, brother.

This just makes me ill.

In an interview on E! Online, George talks about Jedis and Hobbits.

I think Peter [Jackson] did a fantastic job of taking a very tough book and not only being really faithful to it but also making it cinematic.

I wish that George would pay more attention to what Peter accomplished here. The storytelling in [[The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring]] harkens back to the original “Star Wars: A New Hope”.

Let’s hope that George is back in form!!!!

My Father Died.

I can still remember his laugh.

It’s funny the things you remember about a loved one that dies.

This is a play-by-play of the speech made by Steve Jobs.

###Some Hilights

• Apple is now the largest UNIX supplier in the world.
• Interesting how hard it is to make a rack mounted box look anything other than purely utilitarian. Except for the fact that this is Apple and Steve, this show so far is little different than countless other announcements I’ve seen by Sun, IBM, Tandem… Storage flexibility… The meta-message: Apple means business.
• Apple, it now appears to me, is walking the Earth, picking up and putting to use all kinds of freely available innerstructure. They seem to be careful not to position themselves against other UNIXes. Or anything in particular, other than the high costs of Windows. I think they expect this stuff to be added, like a new crop, to existing server farms.
• Alex Grossman, director of server and storage at Apple. Steve just opened up another part of the demo rack. 14 drive bays in on e horizontal enclosure. 1.68″terrorbytes” of storage per rack set. Dual 2Gb Fibre Channel… Redundant drives, power, cooling… Independent ATA controllers. RAID processor, 128 MB of processor cache.
• Now this sucker is looking like a moon, quietly sliding in front of the Sun.
• More positioning as a UNIX company. People are calling us who never used to want to talk to us…. We’re in a lot of Fortune 500 accounts… Calls a past server exploration as a dream when Apple was in a coma.
• It’s over. Now we go to the piano bar. Talked to Steve (Jobs) on the way. Asked him what other server farm crops this would likely run alongside. Everything, he said. Linux, BSD, Sun…

###Some Thoughts

YEAH! It looks like Apple is making the right moves to stick around for a while.

Mac users may want to check the labels on their music CDs twice, as copy-protected audio discs flooding the market may lead to serious problems when they are played on some computer systems.

Unlike standard audio CDs, copy-protected audio discs embed software that seeks to block certain uses of songs, for example, preventing consumers from copying the tracks onto a hard drive. Sony, whose Epic label published Dion’s “A New Day has Come,” has included a warning telling customers that the disc is not compatible with Macs or PCs.

When are these companies going to learn that the best thing to do is to stick to the industry accepted standards.

I hope this isn’t true.

…And you’re struck with the depressing realization that we’d have all been far better off if Lucas had just left well enough alone, leaving EPISODEs I-III to our imagination…

Maybe this’ll be a good thing. I’ve already committed to going into Episode II with lowered expectations… this just lowered them more. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly suprised?

It’s off to game seven.

I can’t believe I stayed awake for this!

The Sharks completely outplayed Colorado for the whole game and had many more great scoring chances only to lose in overtime.

I need a nap.

The judge in the microsoft case is mulling over possible penalties that could include Microsoft delivering a reduced OS.

This would mean that computer makers could choose which application software to include on their computers.

In theory, the stripped-down version of Windows would cost PC makers less to license, and they would be paid a bounty for middleware placement by AOL, RealNetworks and other software developers.

Microsoft hates it, DeGroot said. Now, instead of selling OEMs just the OS, they have to sell the OS and buy a spot on the desktop–something they used to get for free and could do at any time…

Does Microsoft really think it’s going to get off without any significant punishment? ***Think ATT***.

I guess if there’s a budget shortfall, the only right thing to do is take away the people’s right to decide how to handle it.

Blumer called the 2.5 percent limit on yearly property tax hikes *artificial*, and said Proposition 2 1/2 is a relic of a bygone era of fewer public school students and burgeoning commercial tax bases.

Listen up Mr. Blumer… my property taxes went up ***30%*** this past year because of prop 2 1/2 overrides. If I don’t have a say in this in the future, and the town is free to raise the taxes at whatever rate it sees fit to, I may be forced to move out of a house I love and a town I love!

***TAXES ARE NOT THE ANSWER***

And if that isn’t enough, this just adds insult to injury:

The House convenes this morning to debate how to spend the $1.065 billion contained in last week’s tax-hike package.

I thought the whole point of the (unnecessary) tax hike was to make up for budget shortfalls, ***not to fund new spending!***. This is really starting to piss me off!

It’s really Star Wars this time out!

I’ll give you the short version first, completely spoiler-free: I think it’s a great STAR WARS movie, a hell of a good ride, and well worth your time. See it in a digital house if at all possible. And, yes, it’s true… Yoda owns your weak ass.

OK… ya got me. I guess I’ll have to give it a try. Please, oh please, don’t let it be another [[Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace]]!!!!